Typewriter

Convert text to PDF.

Whats Great

• Great for printing raw text files.
• Automatic 'smart' page breaking.
• Supports images.
• Easy to create your own formatter.
• No external libraries.

Whats not Great

• Does not support unicode characters.
• Only supports Baseline JPEG images.
• Only built-in PDF fonts are supported.

Examples

# Make a PDF calendar.
cal -y | tw-raw -o calendar.pdf

# Print a git diff.
git diff | tw-raw -o changes.pdf

# Make a pdf with an image.
cat | tw-image -o document.pdf << EOF
Below this line of text, there is an image:
!IMAGE my_image.jpg
The image is above this line of text.
EOF

Installation

make
sudo cp tw-raw /usr/bin/tw-raw
sudo cp tw-image /usr/bin/tw-image

Usage

There are currently two binaries provided: tw-raw and tw-image.

tw-raw reads ASCII text from standard input, and writes it to a PDF file specified by the -o option or output.pdf by default. A PDF built-in monospace font is used. New pages are created as required. There are no special escape characters for formatting.

tw-image reads ASCII text from standard input. Lines of the form !IMAGE image.jpg will insert the baseline JPEG image into the page at this location. The image is scaled so that the width spans the page width minus margins. Page breaks are automatically selected. Lines of the form --- indicate a good location for a page break, the dashes are not written to the PDF. tw-image will prefer inserting page breaks on empty lines than inbetween non-empty lines.

Write your own tw-* Formatter

Create a new file in this directory named tw-formatter.c, replacing formatter with your desired name. Use tw-raw.c and tw-image.c as a reference when writing your formatter. Next time you run make, your new formatter will be detected, and tw-formatter (or whatever) will be built.

Building your own formatters is encouraged. And its fairly easy due to the small, self-contained codebase.

License

GPLv3. See "LICENSE" for details.